Incredibly cool. I was really hoping to see the more ‘edge’ cases - take the light out to the middle of nowhere, walk towards it and away from it with just your phone or a Bluetooth speaker, see it react to your approach. The bit at the end about it shifting over the course of the day is cool, but I wish the effect was more visually apparent - it mostly just looked like random noise the whole time to me.
This is fantastic. But the idea where you use a camera that can only see the wifi signals in the room like visible light is even more stunning. It would be even better if you could block out all light from the visible spectrum and only see the GHz band.
This is such a neat project. The idea of translating invisible radio waves into visible light is mesmerizing — it feels like giving your surroundings a new sensory dimension.
It’s beautiful. I think I’ve seen something similar in a Ukraine war video where they use a device that lights up on specific frequencies that drones use.
I was just thinking about this the other day, and wondering about directionality...
For example, if you had a camera facing a space, and the receiving antenna was within that space... and you were able to (somehow?) from the antennas perspective, see the "direction" the frequency was coming from..
And then map the different specific frequencies within the desired bandwidth to colors... and of course intensity map like you have in the slit device..
And then "look through the camera"... you would see a live three dimensional overlay of all signals within range (colored!) "interacting" with the antenna... but kind of more the "looking through the camera" sort of view, like you could "see" how those waves were interacting..
And then wouldn't it be interesting to put a tin-foil hat to one side of the attennas.. and see how the waves change in real time... etc.!!!
(I guess it takes three antennas, to triangulate the field? Maybe all three can still be mounted on a single device in close proximity?)
I cannot find the YT video but an artist in residence did a short film with scratch-over of footage in an RF lab which tries to give a visual impression of the waves emitted by things present.
We're bathed in EMF. It's what light is, but aside from that we use electricity so much now, we're in a sea of radiation in other frequencies too.
Yes each LED channel has an inductor. I needed this because I wanted the LED to be constant current driven, to reduce flicker and improve their longevity
A much simpler and less cool project would be to convert a slice of the RF spectrum into an RGB value with lowest frequencies mapped to red, highest to blue, and the resulting color being how we would perceive the mix.
That would still be cool - but what I really like about this is that it says something quite interesting about human existence, how we live, and in particular how we live in cities when we are in proximity to each other.
I once had a antenna with a lamp on it. It was used to detect best place for the radio. It just rectified the energy it received and used a very tiny light bulb
Cool project. I was going to say, the end resulting light should be a pretty saturated spectrum, given that many RF sources just keep pumping out waves, and the those waves propagating and bouncing around.
I think one fun application would be a light which represents your wi-fi strength around the house. Obviously in a smaller apartment that's really not a problem, but in larger houses it would be fun to see.
Another application would be to find hidden RF sources / leaks. I have a home recording studio, and for the life I could not find some RF source that kept adding noise / interference. I could roughly detect the frequency of the noise, but not its origin. I guess if I had a couple of RF sensors I could try to triangulate my way to it.
Very cool! I was having a conversation with my colleagues yesterday about building something to detect when you get scanned by a SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite (we're in earth observation), but you'd have to get a directional antenna to not be drowned out by terrestrial radio signals.
I just watched all the other videos of their pieces, and all of them are absolutely amazing conceptual explorations of our relationship with technology. Really amazing stuff
you have everything right in front of your eyes, next if you add a transformer which convers these light signals into what they actually are then Voilà, you can see what's travelling in the air (Photos, conversations, music)
46 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadI was just thinking about this the other day, and wondering about directionality...
For example, if you had a camera facing a space, and the receiving antenna was within that space... and you were able to (somehow?) from the antennas perspective, see the "direction" the frequency was coming from..
And then map the different specific frequencies within the desired bandwidth to colors... and of course intensity map like you have in the slit device..
And then "look through the camera"... you would see a live three dimensional overlay of all signals within range (colored!) "interacting" with the antenna... but kind of more the "looking through the camera" sort of view, like you could "see" how those waves were interacting..
And then wouldn't it be interesting to put a tin-foil hat to one side of the attennas.. and see how the waves change in real time... etc.!!!
(I guess it takes three antennas, to triangulate the field? Maybe all three can still be mounted on a single device in close proximity?)
We're bathed in EMF. It's what light is, but aside from that we use electricity so much now, we're in a sea of radiation in other frequencies too.
It is fun making it part of the show though.
https://rootkid.me/works/exhibit-a
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46729428
(and they cost like 5ct each)
https://youtu.be/B_gLxVZuk60
Uranium by Radioactiveman
I think one fun application would be a light which represents your wi-fi strength around the house. Obviously in a smaller apartment that's really not a problem, but in larger houses it would be fun to see.
Another application would be to find hidden RF sources / leaks. I have a home recording studio, and for the life I could not find some RF source that kept adding noise / interference. I could roughly detect the frequency of the noise, but not its origin. I guess if I had a couple of RF sensors I could try to triangulate my way to it.
But tuning in to the specific wifi channel you router use you could even use this piece as a signal strenght plotter!